Course Requirements

The capstone requirement for the M.S. Degree is fulfilled through an application team project. Students are expected to work on their capstone requirement starting in the winter quarter, with refinements and final pitches in the spring quarter, and final execution of the project during the summer. Teams will be made of four to five students, who will work collaboratively on the project.

The teamwork will be spread over a 3 unit class in winter (NLP 271A), a 5 unit class in spring (NLP 271B) and a 5 unit class in summer (NLP 271C) to constitute the complete 13 unit capstone experience. Teams will need to do oral presentations of multiple possible project proposals during the Winter quarter. Then after feedback and refinement, these will result in 5 to 10 page written proposals that will be orally presented during the Spring Quarter. The proposal will detail the team membership, pitch the topic of the project, and detail the sources of data to be used, which will need to be approved by the capstone coordinator (typically, the Executive Director of the program). Each team will be assigned a faculty mentor from among the program faculty or an industrial mentor, who will meet with the team at least once a week to provide guidance and evaluate progress. The evaluation will assess the team’s final product, their group process (e.g., the ability to meet deadlines, generate a range of ideas, listen respectfully to disparate perspectives, distribute work fairly, resolve differences, and communicate effectively), and their individual contributions to the final product. Product evaluation will be based on a final written assessment by the faculty or industrial mentor based on the a final report and presentation to be presented at the annual Natural Language Processing Fair (see below). Group process evaluation will be based on written team evaluations (in which each member evaluates the dynamics of the group as a whole) and written evaluations by the mentor produced on weeks 3, 7 and 10 of the summer quarter. Individual evaluations will be based on peer reviews (each team member evaluates the contributions of his/her teammates), self-evaluations (each team member documents and evaluates his own contributions to the team), and an individual 3 page report written by each team member.

All students will be required to either present a poster or oral presentation at the Natural Language Processing Fair, which will be an integral part of the capstone evaluation. The Natural Language Processing Fair will be an annual one-day event taking place at the end of each Summer term to which program faculty, students and members of the Industry Advisory Board will be encouraged to attend. The fair will also serve as a general outreach to NLP scientists in local industry and government.